Miss Violence

Avranas makes a claim to be considered among the top ranks of international filmmakers.

Miss Violence honors the thoroughly creepy work of Avranas's countrymen, but in his turn of the screw, Avranas marshals the abstract qualities of art cinema to comment upon concrete horror.

A commanding, troubling domestic horror that should launch a long career for Avranas.

Avranas’ film employs an irony-free meter that certainly distinguishes his work from that of Lanthimos or Athina Rachel Tsangari, and lends the film’s most explicitly severe sequences of domestic and sexual abuse a kind of cumulative numbing power.

What’s most disturbing about the film is indeed its placid, almost non-descript surface -- also echoed in the production design and camerawork -- and the knowledge that unspeakable things are happening offscreen and behind closed doors.

What you take from Miss Violence depends both on your stomach for this kind of brutality, and whether you appreciate its cold, mannered formalism – one viewer’s stylistic tour de force is another’s grating Haneke pastiche. Still, this is punchy stuff.